Google's Half-Hearted Commitment to Transparency

Share

Google's Half-Hearted Commitment to Transparency

Google has taken some heat for appeasing the Chinese government and censoring search results on Google.cn. But on a panel at the Computers Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington today, the company's senior policy counsel Andrew McLaughlin argued that the unacceptable alterative was to leave the Chinese people without access to world's most popular search engine.

"It really is a choice between boycott ... or make ugly compromises," said McLaughlin. And if Google doesn't operate in China, "then you're not advancing the goal of providing more information to more people."

That said, Google isn't happy with the status quo, and has a five-point plan to cope with censorship in China and elsewhere.

Be transparent to the world. Make sure everyone knows about the censorship practices of a particular country. Google deliberately presents Google.cn to the rest of the world in the same, censored manner it shows it in China, so that free netizens can compare search results and determine what's being blocked. Google would make China's entire blocklist public, but that's a crime under Chinese law. "I'd like to be able to publish the blocklist, but at least for the moment I don't feel confident that I wouldn't be putting Google employees at risk by doing that," said McLaughlin.

Protect users' personal and confidential information. If a company stores e-mail on Chinese servers, where the government can get it on demand, that company should make sure customers know it.

Band together. Google would like to work with other companies with influence in China to effect policy changes, particularly to get the government to meet some minimal due process standards before getting information or censoring a website. "If enough companies with enough accumulated market capital were to sign on, it would actually mean something," McLaughlin said.

Act on all levels. Stockholders should demand that companies follow these principals.

The common thread is transparency. If you're forced to do evil, Google believes, you should at least make everyone aware of it. That lets users in on what's happening, and ultimately might lead to a change from the grassroots level or through international pressure.

That's why when Google is forced under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to take down a search result for alleged copyright violations, the company links to a copy of the official takedown notice. Transparency in action.

It's a good policy for dealing with censorship. But, sadly, Google takes the opposite approach on the equally-important issue of user privacy.

The company collects and retains forever an enormous amount of information from the public, including a record of every search query a Google user has ever run. If the user is also signed up with Gmail, the company can pull those search results by name. If not, Google can still get them by IP address, or look them up through the everlasting cookie it installs on every user's PC.

And now the company is even offering to store users' word processing documents and spreadsheets.

That's an obvious and tempting target for lawyers in civil litigation, and for law enforcement agencies on fishing expeditions, who might easily subpoena Google for a list of everyone who searched on, for example, "Iraqi war protest," then issue a demand for all of the other searches those users ran.

We don't know whether that's happening or not, because Google has an official policy of not commenting on subpoenas or other legal processes. When the Justice Department sought an extensive list of anonymized search queries from the company, we only learned about it because Google fought the request in open court, out of reluctance to part with a trove of valuable data for free.

There's no legal reason for Google's policy. Civil subpoenas don't carry secrecy requirements, and the gag orders on criminal subpoenas typically expire after a time. (The more onerous National Security Letter remains secret). Google could easily tell us how many divorce lawyers, copyright holders and law enforcement agencies are probing people's search histories – if any.

The only plausible reason for Google to keep this a secret is because it doesn't want to remind the public of how much personal data is warehoused on the company's servers.

This is particularly troubling with civil subpoenas, which typically aren't seen by any judge unless the subpoena is challenged in court. At the very least, Google should revise its privacy policy to guarantee that it will make every reasonable effort to notify a customer before turning over private data, giving that customer a chance to ask a judge to quash an inappropriate subpoena.

Until it does, Google's stated devotion to transparency is transparently flawed.